Bill Clinton: “Well, first of all, I never felt that it was wrong to engage China. I never criticized any President for going to China.…”

“Well, first of all, I never felt that it was wrong to engage China. I never criticized any President for going to China. I always think you're better off talking whenever there's a possibility of advancing the ball, if you will. I thought it was important after Tiananmen Square that the United States be clear, unambiguous, and firm, and to the extent I thought the signals were not as clear or unambiguous as they should have been, I tried to make that plain. Some people I think concluded from that that I thought we ought to, in effect, launch a policy of isolation and try to contain and isolate the Chinese and that that would be the best way to get change. I never believed that. And the reason I'm going to China now is that I think there have been a lot of positive changes in the last 6 years. No, we don't have all the problems solved; we still have differences with them over human rights, over religious rights, over economic issues. In some ways we've made the most progress in the nonproliferation area. But if you look at what's happened in the 5\1/2\ years I've been President, at the work the--you know, the Chinese agreeing to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; accepting the missile technology control guidelines; agreeing not to cooperate in nuclear matters with India and with unsafeguarded facilities, including those that are in Pakistan; they're a member of the NPT--I think we've made significant progress, even in the area of human rights. We've seen the release of Wang Dan , Wei Jingsheng , Bishop Zeng . And I hope there we will get a real resumption of our dialog. I hope this whole legal systems cooperation will continue where I think we can have a big impact in a positive way, in the way China evolves legally and the way it deals with not just commercial matters but also with matters of personal freedom. We've clearly had a lot of security cooperation on the Korean Peninsula, and China has led these five-party talks in the aftermath of the nuclear tests on the Indian subcontinent. So I think that this trip is coming at a time when there have been substantive changes which justify the kind of measured, principled engagement strategy we've followed, and I think it's more than justified. And if you ask me how it compares with the previous policy, I would say that it may just be the passage of time, but I think there are more elements to our policy. We're about to open a DEA office in Beijing. And as I said, I hope very much that as a result of this trip we'll wind up with a genuinely invigorated human rights dialog and perhaps an NGO forum on human rights. I don't think there's any ambiguity here about the extent to which we have tried to put all the elements of our engagement in China into our policy and pursue them all in the way we feel would be most effective.”